Comfort Blankets
by aces
Summary: Enough warm fuzzies to suffocate and enough gooey cutesiness to nauseate...please read anyway. :)


Dedicated to Dr Seuss and my parents, especially my mother...without whom childhood would not have been quite so comforting. And yes, one day I'll stay awake long enough to count them all.  
  
Disclaimers: me no own characters, me no make no money off story. Me just write for entertainment. Yes. ;-)  
  
COMFORT BLANKETS  
  
Darien was caught in a memory.  
  
It had come upon him unexpectedly, something one of the others had said somehow conjuring up the decades-old image. He hadn't thought of it since actually living it, and so the memory was fresh, vivid, as shiny and new as a freshly-minted penny. It took his breath away.  
  
He'd been jumping on the bed and giggling, and Kevin had been yelling at him from his own room next door, but Darien usually ignored his brother's yelling anyway. And then his door had burst open, his mother standing there.  
  
Darien stopped jumping. It took the bed a couple seconds to catch up with him, and he kept his head down, not wanting to see the look in his mom's eyes. Not wanting to get yelled at, either. Or worse, she would just quietly and tiredly ask him to stop jumping on the bed. He hated it when she spoke in that numbed, deadened voice. She wasn't his mom then. And she was so hard to cheer up when she was like that, too.  
  
She looked at him from the doorway, and he looked at her sneakily from under his eyelashes on the bed. And then the frown lines smoothed out from around her mouth, from her brow, and she closed the door softly behind her. "Do you want me to read to you?" she asked gently.  
  
A smile lit up his face, and he scrambled to the top of the bed so he could get under the covers and be properly situated for a reading. She usually didn't get to read him to sleep. He didn't miss the smile that reflexively crossed his mom's face as she went over to the small bookcase that held his few books, mostly hand-me-downs from his brother.  
  
She sat herself down on the bed next to him, opening the front cover to the very first page of the slim, tall hardback she'd picked. "This book is to be read in bed," she started clearly, and turned the page.  
  
And so Darien followed his mother through Dr Seuss's Sleep Book, hearing about Biffer-Baum Birds building nests and the Collapsible Frink collapsing in a heap. Sleep-Talkers and Curious Crandles with their candles and the infamous Zwieback Motel with beds like rocks and sheets too short...he particularly liked imagining the feel of the bed of a Jedd and sounding out moose juice and goose juice along with his mother.  
  
And, as always happened when his mom read this book to him, he fell asleep before he could count all the creatures who had fallen asleep, to make sure there really were ninety-nine zillion nine trillion and two (three now, with him). But even as his eyes refused to remain open, and he could feel himself drifting away to some other place that was dark and warm and cosy, he felt a kiss planted on to the top of his head and heard his mother's whispered, peaceful tones, "Good night, Darien."  
  
"Darien?" The Keeper's puzzled voice brought him back to the present.  
  
"Hey, Fawkes," his partner elbowed him in the arm. "Where'd you go, partner?"  
  
"Spacing off again, Fawkes?" Monroe added her own acerbic contribution. "And we are *not* going to that disgusting place you like so much, Hobbes. I want *real* food. Not food poisoning."  
  
"Hey, it is real food! I'll have you--"  
  
"Now, now, boys and girls," Claire's voice cut across them both before the argument could escalate any further and bring guns into it, a wry grin emerging on her lips. "Where do *you* think we should get lunch, Darien?"  
  
"What?" He looked up at them, confused and still half-tangled in the memory. And then a slow grin lit up his face, and he started quickly striding down the hall.  
  
"Fawkes?" Confusion was definitely in the air as the other three slowly followed. He turned around, walking backwards, still with an odd little smile shining in his eyes.  
  
"I don't care where we go to eat," he said, "so long as we stop at a bookstore along the way." 


End file.
